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Virtual reality leaves you virtually reeling

By Jeff Hecht in Boston

JANNICK Rolland knew there was something wrong when she took off a virtual
reality helmet and tried to drink a soda. She brought the can to the top of her
head instead of her mouth, and a colleague had to stop her before she poured the
soda all over herself.

The experience got Rolland, of the University of Central Florida in Orlando,
and her colleague Frank Biocca of Michigan State University, thinking about the
side effects of immersive environments. In a series of experiments, the pair
found that although users quickly adapt to working with virtual reality
displays, it takes about half an hour for their hand-eye coordination to return
to normal afterwards. The researchers found that users regularly misjudge the
positions of real world targets after removing the displays. Such mistakes could
be catastrophic for surgeons trying to perform operations with the assistance of
virtual reality tools, they say.

Virtual reality displays shift perspective, and therefore depth perception,
because one of the cues our brains use to judge distance is the difference
between the images each eye sees. However, the cameras—whether real or
part of a computer program—that produce the images projected onto each
side of a virtual reality headset are seldom the same distance apart as the
viewer’s eyes. Rolland says that one way around the problem is to use simple
image-splitting mirrors that overlay video or computer-generated images on the
real world: “You see the real world as it is, and you add information to it.”
This does not distort viewers’ perspective.